Representative Voting Games
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Representative Voting Games John Duggan1 · Jean Guillaume Forand2 Received: 28 June 2019 / Accepted: 24 August 2020 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract We propose the stationary Markov perfect equilibria of representative voting games as a benchmark to evaluate the outcomes of dynamic elections, in which the evolution of voters’ political power is endogenous. We show that the equilibria of dynamic elections can achieve this benchmark if politicians are sufficiently office motivated. For arbitrary equilibria of the electoral model, we characterize the faithfulness of politicians’ choices to the policy objectives of representative voters through a delegated best-response property. Finally, we provide conditions under which general dynamic electoral environments admit representative voters in each state.
1 Introduction To analyze the effect of delegation in political systems, it is important to understand the outcomes that would obtain in an idealized environment in which voters retain policy-making power. These outcomes may have interest as a normative benchmark, and to the extent that they match equilibria of the political system, they can serve as an analytical shortcut. In static models with single-peaked preferences, the usual benchmark is the preferred policy of the median voter. As is well known, the median ideal policy is a Condorcet winner, distinguishing its normative status, and it is the unique equilibrium outcome of Downsian elections when candidates can commit to policy platforms before an election. This confluence holds when candidates have a range of objectives from pure office seeking to pure policy motivation, and thus, under broad conditions, Downsian competition among two candidates is consistent with the idealized benchmark. In this paper, we examine a dynamic analogue of the J. G. Forand: This author acknowledges support from a SSHRC IDG. * Jean Guillaume Forand [email protected] John Duggan [email protected] 1
University of Rochester, Rochester, USA
2
University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada
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J. Duggan, J. G. Forand
static model, in which a state variable follows a controlled Markov process, and the identity of a representative voter can depend on the state and evolves stochastically over time. Within this framework, we compare the direct choices of voters to the policy outcomes of a dynamic electoral model, in which voters delegate policy-making power to political representatives, whose choices are a product of ideological and office-holding incentives. Specifically, we study the conditions under which the policy choices of politicians, who are held accountable to different voters over time through elections, conform to the idealized benchmark. Given this dynamic environment, we take as our benchmark the representative voting game, in which successive representative voters exercise their political power not through elections, but by implementing policies directly. In this game, each period starts with a state; the rep
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